


Choice

by Lolymoon



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: 4x20, Blood, Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Infertility, Regal Believer, enjoy your angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-09
Updated: 2015-05-09
Packaged: 2018-03-29 18:03:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3905695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lolymoon/pseuds/Lolymoon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Because vengeance never gives, father. It only takes."<br/>4X20. Regina's mindset after she drinks that potion. A tinge of Regal Believer at the end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Choice

**Author's Note:**

> Just an angsty little one-shot that I wrote on tumblr after 4x20... because Regina Mills broke my heart one again.

The pain is a hot, sharp knife, slithering its way along her entrails, piercing like a broken cry through her womb, worming up between her ribs and aiming straight for the heart.

The pain is hot.

Excruciating.

But save for that lone tear drying up on her cheek, she doesn't weep, she doesn't wail, she stays still, without breath, thighs tightly clamped together, feeling the warm blood trickling down her legs, the last blood, for a life that will now never come out of her. For a life she will never give.

But when has she given something other than death and destruction?

She is not sad.

She's writhing in agony but she is not sad.

This is her choice.

This is winning.

She won.

 

She knows of no victories but the ones that hurt.

.

.

.

When her father finds her in her chamber, perhaps an hour later, she is sitting in a pool of blood, clutching hard at the chair she's fallen off, and she is laughing between sharp intakes of breath and the cramps and the spasms that still haven't entirely subsided.

 

"I did it, daddy. I was stronger this time. I got strong."

 

She is laughing and shaking and the smell of blood is biting her nose and choking her throat and her father is pale, so pale, pale and weak, weak, weak, the face of defeat, the face of infamy, a face she loves and despises, but when he kneels down beside her and takes her in his arms, she lets go, lets herself be held, be petted, be dwarfed to the child she never ceases to be in his eyes, the child he never protected, the child he let be sold to a king, the child whose darkness he couldn't swallow, the child who destroys hearts with small, needy hands that have never learn to heal and caress and never will.

 

"I did it," she whispers in the crook of his neck, while his tired old fingers weave in her hair, "I hurt her this time."

 

"Oh, my child," he heaves a weary sigh, "why do you always have to ruin yourself to get back at the world?"

 

She closes her eyes, and presses her fists tight, tight against her stomach, tight until the outside should hurt more than the inside – but it doesn't.

She speaks in a voice that doesn't belong to a child, she speaks a truth she will forever hold in the void of her heart but refuses to look in the eye, she speaks calm and collected as she will never be again for years to come.

 

"Because vengeance never gives, father. It only takes."

 

 

When she goes to bed that night, clean and sore, she discovers that some pains are so great you cannot wash them away by crying yourself to sleep.

This was her choice.

She will never regret it.

She will never regret the first time she finally had control over her own fate.

The first time she felt like her body belonged to her.

She'll never regret.

 

She never sheds a tear again on the hope she crushed by her own hand.

 

But the first time she holds Henry in her arms, after he's finally stopped crying, after he's looking at her with bright, wondering eyes that strips her off her mask, after he's chosen _her_ and he's willing to give her a chance, she cries.

 

This was her choice then.

 

This is her choice now.

**Author's Note:**

> Thoughts?


End file.
